TOI-3757 b Marshmallow planet (NOIRlab)
What scientists are describing as a Marshmallow Planet similar to Jupiter has been discovered in another solar system. But don’t get your twigs ready by the campfire just yet, as this planet is not really made out of marshmallows. Astronomers discovered the planet – designated TOI-3757 b – using the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab.
The Marshmallow planet is being described as the “fluffiest” gas giant ever discovered orbiting this type of star.
So the new NASA James Webb Telescope is not the only one out there making important astronomical discoveries.
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So what the heck is a Marshmallow planet anyway? Well, it is a planet of very low density and this one orbits Red Dwarf star. Jupiter, for example, is a gas giant with little actual rock. It is not yet known what lies at the center of Jupiter, but it may be possible to actually travel all the way through it in a spaceship if there is nothing solid in the middle of all of that gas.
Noirlab explains that Red dwarf stars are the smallest and dimmest members of so-called main-sequence stars — stars that convert hydrogen into helium in their cores at a steady rate. Though “cool” compared to stars like our Sun, red dwarf stars can be extremely active and erupt with powerful flares capable of stripping a planet of its atmosphere, making this star system a seemingly inhospitable location to form such a gossamer planet
“Giant planets around red dwarf stars have traditionally been thought to be hard to form,” says Shubham Kanodia, a researcher at Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory and first author on a paper published in The Astronomical Journal. “So far this has only been looked at with small samples from Doppler surveys, which typically have found giant planets further away from these red dwarf stars. Until now we have not had a large enough sample of planets to find close-in gas planets in a robust manner.”
Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is a program of the NOIRLab. KPNO operates the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope on behalf of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey (a project led by the US Department of Energy Office of Science) and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope (a partnership between Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Purdue University, the NSF and NASA). It also hosts the facilities of consortia that operate between them more than a dozen optical telescopes and two radio telescopes.
KPNO is located 90 km (56 miles) southwest of Tucson, Arizona, at an altitude of 2096 m (6877 ft) in the Schuk Toak District on the Tohono O’odham Nation and has a visitor center open daily and nightly to the public, offering daytime guided tours and a variety of evening stargazing programs.
